ResearchKit app will visualise asthma's impact on the UK

Outdoor air pollution causes around 40,000 deaths a year, according to new research from the Royal College of Physicians (RCP). Now an app built using Apple's ResearchKit health platform will bring smartphone-based, large-scale monitoring tools for the condition to the UK for the first time.

Cancer, stroke and heart disease, diabetes, obesity and changes related to dementia have also been linked to pollution. Health problems from exposure to air pollution could cost as much as £20 billion a year -- the RCP report. But asthma is still one of the biggest health problems related to poor air quality, and it especially affects young children. Asthma Health, the ResearchKit app launched this week in the UK, seeks to find ways to alleviate some of the symptoms of asthma while it gathers data for a large-scale medical study.

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Developed by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and LifeMap Solutions, the app is built on Apple's open source platform that allows users to gather data, via their iPhone, which could later be used in medical research. The platform enables researchers to collect huge datasets that may otherwise be "impossible" to gather without an expensive trial.

Asthma Health also provides educational information, self-monitoring and other features that can help alleviate and monitor the symptoms of asthma. Users are able to check local air quality readings, provided by air pollution data platform BreezoMeter, log their walking and running data from their iPhone's inbuilt accelerometer and input asthma inhaler data which can be gathered and measured by third party devices. "The data we collect -- which we do with the full consent of the user -- includes GPS coordinates, which can be linked to different GPS-tagged data streams that are publicly available, such as pollution levels, pollen count, temperature and so on," Eric Schadt, founding director of the Icahn Institute of Genomics and advisor for Asthma Health, told WIRED. "We can also pull in data from bluetooth devices, data from activity monitors and user acquired data, like height, weight, disease severity, goals, medication and so on."

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The app also provides users with "positive behavioural changes", written according to current asthma guidelines, and suggests tips which may help sufferers cope better with their asthma. Live maps use real-time data from BreezoMeter to analyse air quality readings, so sufferers can avoid highly congested areas. And potential triggers, such as house dust, animal hair, exhaust fumes, are also flagged by the maps.

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

The app has already had success in the US, with 8,600 participants. The study was "one of the largest real-world epidemiological studies of asthma," said Schadt. "Now we're adding the UK and Ireland to the clinical research platform."

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Yu-Feng Chan, who also worked on the project, says the US trial was a benchmark in collecting global data sets. "Our Asthma Health study in the USA demonstrated the feasibility of reliably consenting participants and collecting rich data across a diverse population by digitising and automating the research processes that are traditionally labour intensive and time consuming," she said in a press release.

The data gathered by Asthma Health will also be used to further understand the triggers for many symptoms of asthma, and researchers hope they will "learn new ways to personalise asthma treatment" through the app's findings.

This, Schadt says, will allow medical teams across the world to collect "an unprecedented breadth and depth" of health data. "It could help us create a more holistic view of individuals and the disease on a population level," he said. "The research has many goals," he told WIRED. "First we want to assess whether a user's disease condition improves via the use of the app. Do they become more active, do they have fewer attacks, are they better informed about their condition, do they comply with their medication usage. And we also want to establish whethe we can identify features from the data that are able to better predict a given user's state of wellness, predict when a user may be heading for an asthma attack so the app can fire a trigger to healthcare professionals that the user may need some intervention." "We have the potential for the apps to go beyond research and into improving patient care."